CentOS 7 Resources

The CIMS Linux desktop and compute environment will be upgrading to CentOS 7 later this year. Information about CentOS 7 and our migration to it will be documented here.

This documentation will be heavily influenced by the feedback that you, the users, send us about your CentOS 7 experiences. If you have any questions at all (no question is stupid or insignificant!), please send them to helpdesk@cims.nyu.edu and let us know --- your question will likely become a part of this documentation.

UPDATE (February 2016): We've encountered a number of stability issues with CentOS 7 which have been holding us back from rolling CentOS 7 out to more machines.

Why CentOS 7?

From the official CentOS wiki:

CentOS Linux is a community-supported distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by Red Hat for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). As such, CentOS Linux aims to be functionally compatible with RHEL. The CentOS Project mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork. CentOS Linux is no-cost and free to redistribute.

Our choice of an "Enterprise Linux" distribution largely has to do with stability. The "Enterprise Linux" line of Linux distributions uses tried and true versions of software which will provide the most stable and consistent user experience.

Servers with CentOS 7

In preparation for an institution-wide upgrade, we've installed CentOS 7 on a series of servers to give users a chance to try out the new environment. Those servers are: